Saturday, July 20, 2013

How Algiers got its mikveh

Was there or wasn't there a mikveh (ritual bath) in Algiers? Apparently one was built in the late 1950s at the behest of chief rabbi Fingerhut, who came from Strasbourg to run the La Bouzareah Yeshiva between 1955 - 60.

The Jewish women of Algiers evidently took coexistence with their Muslim neighbours seriously: they had a bath set aside for them in the Moorish Baths near the Bab el Oued market. But according to a little snippet from Infojuive (May/June 2013), the Consistoire (the French-based authority which ran the Algerian Jewish community) determined that the Jews of Algiers should have their own mikveh.

Infojuive says that the new mikveh was built by an Italian builder friend of Joseph Dahan, who had once asked him for a jerrycan of petrol for his van when he was going through tough financial times. The Italian builder was himself indebted to Dahan and began constructing the mikveh in a small courtyard adjoining the synagogue on the rue de Dijon.

The mikveh was finished in 1958 when it was officially opened. It was little used, however. Who could blame the good Jewish women of Algiers - they probably much preferred the steamy atmosphere of the Moorish baths.

In any case, within three years, the Jews of Algeria had begun their mass exodus.

3 comments:

Sylvia
said...

I doubt this story. There were consistoires in Algeria since the 19th century they waited until 1958 to build a mikveh? besides, very few Jews associated wityh Consistoire. Those "indigenous Jews" as the French Jews called them had their own set up and private synagogues and never associated with the consistoires (hint: Ashkenazi rabbis). Perhaps in a particular neighborhood they didn't have a mikveh but the notion that they didn't have one in all of Algiers sounds strange.

The mikve doesn't have to be at the synagogue. It could be in a private house. I know people who have a mikve in their basement. Men also use a mikve, and there is also a need of a mikve for ustensils. And there were different communities that didn't mingle among themselves in Algeria - such as the Livornese, the juifs indigenes, the French French, etc. They couldn't all be going to the same place.

I was responding to your question "was there or wasn't there"? I thought you were saying there wasn't.

The most assimilated woman had to go to the mikve at least once in her lifetime for her wedding. Mikve and Hammam were part of the mandatory ritual that preceded the wedding ceremony. While she dipped, her female family members and close friends enjoyed a good scrubbing at the hammam as part of the grooming for the festivities, not to mention the fun.

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In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)